In October 2007 Jeremy launched the Toolkit for New Politicians developed by the UK-South East Europe Forum project run by the British Council, in which he had been a participant, in Sofia in Bulgaria. His speech was entitled Engaging with Voters in the 21st Century.

Good morning. My name is Jeremy Hargreaves and I was one of the participants in the UK-South East Europe Forum. I had the pleasure to come here to a seminar here in Sofia in February 2005, and it’s a great pleasure to be here again.

At that seminar we spent a very stimulating and productive weekend talking about how we can engage people more widely – party members, and also the wider public – in policy-making. It was fascinating to exchange experiences and views with other participants from right across Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia, and I learnt a lot from it.

Many of those kinds of ideas about political engagement are exactly the kinds of issues highlighted in The New Politician’s Toolkit, put together by James Graham of the New Politics Network, now renamed as Unlock Democracy.

The principles and techniques that it sets out are very useful for showing politicians how to engage the public successfully.

The challenges to engagement in the 21st century

And in the twenty-first century, politicians do find themselves with a range of challenges in engaging the electorate. Across many parts of Europe, turnouts in elections are falling – increasingly, many people are simply not bothering to vote.

The reasons for this are different in different countries and different political cultures. But a few of the reasons put forward are these.

Many people seem disillusioned with their politicians. In many places, the public increasingly think that politicians are either incompetent, or simply in it for what they can personally get out of it for themselves not for the wider public interest.

A perception that politicians too often break their promises, either honestly (through simply failing to deliver on them) or dishonestly, further reinforces that perception.

The nature of our globalised world in the 21st century also plays a part. Sometimes even Presidents and Prime Ministers find themselves saying that there are changes that they cannot make, that they are powerless to resist some of the demands of a global market. And when even politicians themselves say, in part, that there is limited point in voting for them, then voters reasonably ask the same question.

Another factor that certainly in my own experience has reduced normal people’s interest in bothering with the democratic process, is that the politicians putting themselves up before them, asking for their vote, often do not reflect the sorts of people that the voters themselves are. If people think that all politicians are male, over 50, from among the most well off groups, and very rarely from some of the minority ethnic groups, then they make it much more difficult for everyone who isn’t in all those categories to relate to them, and believe that they might understand and act in their interests. Clearly you don’t always have to be a man to consider politically supporting a male candidate, but too often political parties do not look or feel anything at all like the diverse societies that they seek to represent – and that has a major impact on engagement from under-represented groups.

Normal people, for whom politics is just a distraction from their own interests and daily lives, are also less likely to be interested, if the sorts of things that they see politicians talking about don’t reflect the real issues and challenges that the face in their own daily lives. If politics is about anything, it should be about helping people to find solutions to the challenges they personally face. Too often it feels – rightly, or wrongly – that instead politics is about entirely different, much more abstract, ideas.

And I think that – certainly relative to the twentieth century – the increasing convergence of political ideas in the centre has reduced interest in public life. When politics is a vibrant clash of ideological ideas, and people can see the interests both of the country and of themselves at stake, they are much more likely to bother engaging than when they find it difficult to see important differences between the parties.

That will be particularly true when people think that in fact the current political consensus and society, doesn’t actually serve them too badly. For I think the final important factor in political disengagement is what the great American twentieth-century economist who died last year, J K Galbraith, called the “culture of contentment”. This clearly doesn’t apply to everyone in every potential voter in every political culture all of the time, but anyone who doesn’t have a real grievance to try and resolve through the ballot box, is less likely to vote, still less go out and become active in a political party, than someone who does.

Why engagement with voters matters

All these issues and challenges matter. Because politics and the system in which it works matters. Politics should be precisely about people engaging, to try and find solutions to the challenges they face – and every person who doesn’t believe that politics is a useful means of achieving their political aims, and as a result opts out, moves us closer to a system in which those challenges and differences – which don’t go away as a result – are resolved in other, non-democratic, ways.

A merely theoretical ‘democracy’ in which everyone can in principle vote, but they don’t, isn’t a real democracy.

And I believe passionately that democracy – a system in which the public – voters – choose what they want from politics – is the best system of government – for taking into account the equal interests of all citizens, and guaranteeing their own personal human rights. That is why, in all its many different and imperfect forms, it has spread so widely around the world – and why, this week, the monks in Burma are so bravely out on the streets protesting against the actions of a government which does not have the interests of its citizens at heart.

Democracy certainly has its failings – I have touched on a few of them – but as the old saying goes, it seems to be the worst system of government apart from all the others which have from time to time been tried.

So how can we engage with voters more effectively?

So what can we do to tackle the challenges to democratic engagement, and succeed in getting people to make that effort which is crucial to a democratic system?

Well, the first key surely has to be showing people can politics really can change their lives – and relating it directly to them and their concerns. Politics and politicians do still wield an enormous amount of power either to solve the problems in people’s lives, or to make them worse. I’ve had the privilege to work with someone for several years, who through his own determination, got himself and his party elected to power to transform an incompetent Council, and so is directly response for transforming the lives of thousands of people whose lives had been made a misery by an organisation which served them appallingly badly. That is really something for someone to achieve.

Part of our challenge in the twenty-first century is to help people to understand that that is possible. I’ve seen this closely in my own working life. I work for a local Council which provides a wide range of services to local people – everything from cleaning their streets and collecting their rubbish and recycling, to providing schooling for their children and care for their elderly relatives. The public elect the politicians who run that Council every four years. But when we asked the public what they thought that councillors actually did, they thought the answer was some mixture of just having pointless and silly arguments with each other in the council chamber, and sitting in a room quietly listening to individual people’s problems. Too few people had any idea that they themselves had the power to change the people who run the organisation which has most control over their area and its services, and so through that that they had the power to influence what it did.

So party politicians have a responsibility to get out there and explain to them why they should bother voting, why it should really matter to them. And I think the state has that responsibility too. In the UK the Electoral Commission has run some effective campaigns to try to help people understand that – a couple of years ago with the slogan “If you don’t do politics, then there’s not much you do do” which I thought put the point very well.

So it seems to me that the most important key is not only that the public understand the system, but really understand that they themselves can influence it.

And I think a focus on the very local is the key to people’s engagement more widely. It is often much more real and personal to people than national ideas. I know that if I organise a meeting to discuss future arrangements for, for example, the organisation of the national health service, it will get very few people turning up. But if a meeting is held about, say, a proposal to build a new building next to people’s houses, or which will affect their ability to park their car outside their house, it will often attract a large number of people with some very strong views indeed. This is often the way into wider engagement – for as the American Senator Tip O’Neill famously said “All politics is local”.

My own party, the Liberal Democrats, pioneered some methods for doing this, in the UK in the early 1970s. Instead of a focus on major national issues, the process of “community politics” centred around local activists – not really yet even politicians – identifying very local problems, which might have been as specific as a broken paving-stone or streetlight, and then getting it fixed. Crucially, at all stages they told the local residents what they were doing – or in other words they used it as a campaigning tool. The central means for doing this was delivering a leaflet to their neighbours explaining first what they were going to do, and then later what they had done. A former Member of Parliament, David Penhaligon, famously summed this up in the phrase “If you’ve got something to say, put it on a piece of paper and put it through a letterbox”.

In different ways and in different forms, this approach has now become the bedrock of successful political campaigning in all local areas across the UK, and across all parties.

I often think that my own party has something of an obsession with delivering leaflets, almost to the exclusion of all other mechanisms for political campaigning! But the reason is that it is highly effective – not only in getting the odd paving-stone fixed, but in winning dozens of seats in Parliament – indeed most of the 63 current Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament owe their place there to it. It can be very hard work and very intensive, though – in 2003 I took part in the campaign in the Parliamentary byelection in Brent East. I calculated afterwards that over the four months or so of the campaign, volunteers delivered about 125 leaflets for every single vote that the candidate won on polling day.

If leaflets are important in helping the public to understand what politicians stand for and are doing for them, then if politicians are to understand the people they seek to represent, then they need to talk to normal people and voters to understand what their concerns are. A politicians wins the insight into people’s problems which gives him or her the right to take decisions which will affect them, by going out and knocking on doors, talking to people. Some people want to talk politely, and many don’t. Some people will be keen to talk at great length about their personal pet issues. These are all part of the rich interweaving of personalities and issues which it is politics’ job to solve. A politician who just sits in his office, does his job badly. He may get letters from constituents, but they are representative only of the small proportion of people of the kind who write letters to politicians.

I have always been struck by the story of the UK Labour Cabinet Minister of the 1970s, Bill Rodgers, who every month would conduct a political ’surgery’, where any of his constituents could come and see him with their problems, and then after the surgery he would just go out and knock on people’s doors, just to talk to them and hear their concerns, and he wouldn’t go home until he had spoken to twelve people.

People are often engaged not because of one political party’s general political approach, but because of a single issue that they are passionate about. Indeed one of the phenomena of politics in the twenty-first century is the rise of the single-issue campaign organisation, whether that’s perhaps against a particular tax or for some other particular political objective. These organisations’ aims are often political but they sit outside party politics. They have a legitimate place in the political world – but political parties can also use single issues to engage people too. Often the most effective political campaigns are ones run on very specific particular issues, engaging people who are concerned about that issue, rather than simply a party’s general political views.

In response to the alienation of some voters by not seeing politicians who they think are like them, clearly parties need to address that by themselves being a more diverse group of people. Voters and potential activists need to see faces like their own, and believe that it can do something for them and they can be involved. That can be one of the most difficult things for a party to do. Political parties, like most organisations, naturally tend to perpetuate themselves in the future from the way they have been in the past. Actively going out and involving others who are different can be one of the most difficult things to do – particularly when it may require positive action to bring new people up to an equal starting line, which to many is contrary to principles of equal participation. Similarly, new arrivals can struggle with the existing political culture of the organisation they are seeking to join, and it can be a very difficult conversation indeed. Most UK political parties, certainly including my own, have struggled with how to make this leap and make themselves more representative of the people they seek to represent: women and ethnic minorities, for example, are massively under-represented in the UK Parliament.

An emerging new arena for political engagement is in the internet. Interestingly, it seems to me that we in Europe are a bit behind in this trend. In the USA both email contact from politicians to voters is much more common, and political discussion websites or blogs are much more powerful in engaging people and setting the political agenda. In Japan, I understand that much wider use is made of other techniques such as virtual-reality worlds like Second Life.

But having said that, in my own experience, campaigning via the internet has moved on in leaps in bounds just in the last year or two – and indeed I have started my own blog: a website where I can give my own political views to anyone who cares to look. And such mechanisms for a single lone commentator to contribute are now starting to be picked up by the mainstream media.

And all UK political parties are now starting to put up their own campaigning videos on YouTube, campaigning pictures on flickr – and to use social networking sites such as Facebook to contact potential voters and keep them in touch. David Cameron, the Leader of the UK Conservative Party, has launched his own website with clips of video diary, called ‘WebCameron’, and it does a very good job of helping voters to see him how he is as a person.

These techniques, although still relatively in their infancy, are already helping politicians to make contact, often with people who would not respond to some more traditional means of campaigning – such as people in cities who do not really want to engage in their own local area, and young people. They clearly are not about to replace traditional campaigning, but they are certainly an addition to it.

All these ideas and many more are explored in much more detail in the Toolkit, along with some very useful practical advice in how to implement them. When I read the toolkit I was astonished at the wide range of the issues it covers – from some of the more core political skills and issues, such as campaigning, to how to run that campaign and ensure it works as a well-functioning organisation.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to set out what I think some of the challenges are to engaging voters, but why I think it’s essential that political parties and the state do make that effort, and some of the ways that I think they can effectively go about that.

Of course there’s one final reason why political parties should go out and seek to engage with voters which I haven’t mentioned, and which is perhaps the most obvious. The more effectively that any political party can engage with people, not just in winning votes but more deeply, the more successful it will be as a political party! That’s a great incentive and this toolkit sets out very helpfully and practically many ways of doing that.